Qureos Secures $5 Million Seed Round to Transform Hiring with AI Across MENA and Beyond

Qureos, a UAE-based talent technology company that uses artificial intelligence to reimagine recruitment, has raised $5 million in a seed funding round to accelerate product development, expand its market footprint and scale its AI-enabled hiring platform for employers and job seekers. The round was led by Prosus Ventures and Salica Oryx Fund, with participation from Oraseya Capital, PlusVC, F6 Ventures, BDev Ventures, Sunny Side Venture Partners and industry executive Daniel Tyre. Follow-on support came from COTU Ventures and Globivest, both of which had backed the company in earlier stages.

This milestone marks a pivotal step in Qureos’s evolution — from an early “learn-to-earn” marketplace concept to a global hiring infrastructure platform powered by AI.

Origins and Early Funding

Qureos was founded in 2021 by Alexander Epure, Usama Nini, and Mehrad Yaghmai with an ambitious mission to connect talent, mentors, and employers in new experiential ways. The startup originally focused on cohort-based learning and on-demand mentoring for professionals through a blended community and marketplace model designed to accelerate careers and reduce the skills gap between education and employment opportunities.

In its pre-seed round in 2022, Qureos raised $3 million from COTU Ventures, Colle Capital, and other regional and global investors to scale its “learn to earn” platform and grow its remote-first team. That early investment supported rapid growth in its user base, which spanned tens of thousands of learners and connected professionals from across more than 127 countries.

The company’s early model combined mentorship, community engagement, and work experiences to help both individuals and employers optimize hiring decisions. Over time, however, Qureos expanded its focus toward AI-driven hiring solutions, responding to increasing global demand for tools that help organisations hire faster and more intelligently.

What Qureos Today Offers: Unified AI-Driven Hiring Workflows

At its core, Qureos has built a holistic hiring platform designed to address what it describes as the fragmentation and inefficiency in traditional recruitment processes. Typical hiring workflows rely on disconnected tools — separate sourcing channels, manual screening, and time-consuming interview logistics — which slow down overall hiring cycles.

Qureos combines these elements into a single intelligent system, anchored by its proprietary AI assistant called Iris. Iris functions as a virtual recruiter for both employers and job seekers:

• For employers: Iris automates sourcing from more than 2,000 job boards and social channels, enriches candidate profiles using prediction models and public data, conducts initial candidate screening in seconds, and facilitates AI-led interviews via video or audio.
• For job seekers: The AI matches candidates to suitable roles across the broader market, provides real-time feedback on applications, and helps individuals navigate opportunities with greater clarity than typical job portals provide.

This unified approach aims to significantly reduce time-to-hire — with some customers reporting hiring cycles shrinking from several months down to as little as six days — and to transform hiring from an operational bottleneck into a competitive advantage for fast-growing companies.

Use Cases, Traction, and Market Adoption

Qureos’s platform is particularly relevant in high-volume hiring environments where speed and quality of hire directly influence business outcomes. It has gained traction with a range of enterprise and public sector organisations, serving teams across industries that include aviation, government, construction, property management, and tourism. Organisations such as Qatar Airways, Dubai Economy and Tourism, BAAN Holdings, and Union Properties have adopted the platform to streamline large-scale recruitment.

The platform is designed with regional requirements in mind, including compliance with GCC localisation and nationalisation policies, while also being flexible enough to integrate with existing applicant tracking systems (ATS) and human resource information systems (HRIS). This blend of localisation and interoperability has helped Qureos appeal to multinational and local employers across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Investors and Strategic Backing

The $5 million seed round reflects confidence from well-established global and regional investors. Prosus Ventures, a major global technology investor, led the round alongside Salica Oryx Fund, signalling strong institutional endorsement for Qureos’s vision. Other contributors included venture firms such as Oraseya Capital, PlusVC, F6 Ventures, BDev Ventures, Sunny Side Venture Partners, and influential angel investor Daniel Tyre, whose background includes senior roles at HubSpot.

Follow-on investments from prior backers COTU Ventures and Globivest further ratify the long-term confidence in Qureos’s model and growth trajectory. Their continued support bridges early learning-market positioning to the current focus on recruitment AI infrastructure.

What This Means for the Region and the Future of Recruitment Technology

The Qureos funding round comes at a time when the “future of work” narrative is accelerating globally, driven by automation, AI, and changing dynamics in employment markets. Employers everywhere are under pressure to hire faster, reduce bias, and improve candidate engagement — all while managing tight labour markets and rising skill gaps.

Qureos’s approach aligns with broader trends in HR technology:

• AI-enabled candidate sourcing and screening is rapidly becoming standard in enterprise workflows.
• Integrated platforms that replace tool fragmentation are valued for both scalability and data continuity.
• Real-time feedback and transparency in hiring processes improve employer brand and candidate experience.

In the context of the MENA region, where digital transformation initiatives are gaining momentum, Qureos’s success highlights the appetite for purpose-built enterprise technology that can scale across different markets. By combining local understanding with global AI techniques, the company is positioned to serve a wide array of hiring challenges in markets where speed and efficiency have become strategic imperatives.

What’s Next for Qureos

With the new capital, Qureos intends to:

• deepen its AI capabilities and further enhance automation features,
• strengthen its go-to-market and enterprise partnership teams,
• expand its footprint into new regional markets through strategic alliances with recruitment agencies and enterprises.

The funding will also support broader geographic expansion, including deeper penetration into emerging economies where hiring inefficiencies are pronounced and digital solutions are in increasing demand.

Qureos’s $5 million seed round marks a significant inflection point in its evolution from a learning-and-mentorship marketplace into a full-scale AI hiring platform. With strong investor backing, a growing customer base that already spans hundreds of organisations, and a product suite that addresses core pain points in talent acquisition, Qureos is positioning itself as a leading infrastructure player in the future of global recruitment technology.

For businesses seeking to improve speed-to-hire and candidate experience, and for investors looking at HRtech opportunities in growth markets, Qureos represents a compelling case of regional innovation meeting universal operational needs.